US News & World Report’s annual rankings of American universities has long been deemed the gold standard of the genre. And by its criteria four New Jersey universities achieved largely undistinguished rankings.

The highest was Rutgers (New Brunswick) at 70. This was followed by Stevens Institute of Technology (76), Seton Hall (126) and New Jersey Institute of Technology (149). Respectable, but nothing to write home about.

But Business Insider didn’t let it rest there.

It sought to find the most underrated colleges in America. And it figured that the best way to measure this was to “look for schools that had relatively low rankings on the US News list but whose students had high mid-career salaries.” The salary info came from the PayScale College Salary Report, which ranks colleges and universities based on their graduates’ mid-career earnings.

When the Business Insider folks ran the numbers, guess what they found?

The most underrated college in America is the New Jersey Institute of Technology. Not only are most NJIT grads “employed immediately after graduation,” 10 years into their careers, the average salary of an NJIT alum clocks in at $98,000 a year.

Not bad.

And those other three Jersey schools fared pretty well here as well: Stevens ($124,000), Rutgers ($90,400) and Seton Hall ($89,000). Surely these salary figures make the schools more attractive to would-be applicants who might not have been impressed looking at the US News & World Report rankings.

We’re not saying there’s anything wrong with the US News & World Report rankings — or even that the Business Insider rankings are better. But we believe the salary information provided here is something most people would want to know. Given how much Americans are being asked to shell out for a college degree that is no longer the ticket to the middle class it once was, no one measure will suffice.

As we have said all along, one of the glaring omissions of American college life is how little real information students and their parents have about what they are getting in exchange for the tens of thousands they pay in tuition.

So kudos to the New Jersey Institute of Technology for the value it provides. And kudos to Business Insider for reminding us how much we need new ways of ranking our colleges and universities.